The Ghosts That We Knew
by Bamfsback
Summary: A collection of vignettes dealing with the death of Kurt Wagner and beyond. Kurtty.
1. Chapter 1

It had been difficult, the same sort of endlessly annoying, tedious and drawn-out feeling he'd gotten when his uniform had gotten so soaked through that the water had reached his fur, and everything became an impossible vacuum-sealed combination of clingy spandex and clingy fur. It'd taken what had seemed like _forever_ to peel himself out of the ridiculous ensemble, in those instances, and every moment of it had felt like a literal fur-pulling agony. Not, as it turned out, that it had actually been anything even remotely resembling _agony_. Not that it had been even in the same family of sensations.

And not that this had been something so petty as removing the red and black.

When he finally slipped free of his body and the sheer pain it had been experiencing, the relief that Kurt Wagner felt was enormous. It was a bigger, broader, wider feeling than he'd ever felt before, something indescribably large, larger than felt could fit inside his body-which was just fine, suddenly, because suddenly he knew he had no _ties_ to that body any longer. The process of dying, he understood now what he had always suspected, was itself terrifying and painful, but the state of _being dead_, after the dying, was actually more of a _comfort_ than living had ever been.

Still, beyond the euphoria that faded to comfort, Kurt was filled with the nagging feeling of having left something unfinished, something that was keeping him from really being able to answer to call that was showering down on him from above. There was something he needed to do first.

The world around him had grown hazy and soft-focus, and even as he realized he could look around him and see the grief-stricken faces of those he had called friends and family for so long, gathered around the shell he'd left behind, he realized something else; he could 'phase', much like one of his oldest and dearest friends could, through the ground and move at his whim regardless of what had once stood as a physical barrier. He also realized that the one thing he needed to do lay in the medical labs below Utopia's ground. Like a sigh, he drifted downwards, passing through his own body and rock and metal, wires and infrastructure.

Time took on a distorted feeling that had no meaning; Kurt could feel no sense of _hurry_ so divorced from his flesh and bone, from the heart in his chest which had kept time and tempo for every moment of his life. By the time he got where he was going, the sun had already finished setting, and _someone_ had gotten there before him.

Their forms were as insubstantial-looking as he imagined he must look to them, if they could see him at all. Kurt had no reason to believe they could. Still, he could make out what was going on if he concentrated, like the effort of will it took to hold on to something that was almost out of reach. Logan's squat, dense form with both hands pressed against the metallic cylinder , his forehead leaning against its viewing port. Kitty's own blurry image inside, both hands over her mouth. He could feel the heartache radiating off of them in waves, and briefly his entire being-what was left of it-was overcome with regret. He hadn't even gotten to say _hello_ to Kitty, much less _goodbye_, not since she'd returned from being lost in the stars, and now...

...now it was too late.

Too late to make amends, too late to tell Scott where he could _shove _his terrible crusade, too late to remake decisions that he knew in his heart he'd never have made any other way _anyway_. Kurt felt heavy, like there was a great inertia pulling him downwards, watching the shadow play of the man who might as well have been his brother tell the closest friend he'd ever had that there would be no happy reunion for them, not now or ever again. Logan should never had found cause to carry _that _burden, too.

Yet, as he watched, Kurt became slowly aware of something. A shift in the palette of colors his friends were made of, or perhaps more accurately a shift in his perception. He could see, suddenly, the dark patches over their hearts, the places where their souls had been battered, pieces torn away by loss and life and villainy. There were so many holes, so much pain and patchwork in the both of them, that Kurt knew he would never be able to make up the difference. Just as suddenly, he knew that he _could _do _something_.

He really had no actual _inside_ or _outside_ any more, but it still _felt_ like reaching inside of himself and tearing free small pieces of his immortal _self_. Fragments of whatever ineffable star-stuff made him unmistakably _Kurt Wagner_ and no one else-he tore them free with a strange wrenching sensation of not-pain and rolled them between his 'fingers' until they had formed into small, lopsided spheres. Without any better idea of what he was doing than the instinct to do it, Kurt reached forward, letting his hand pass through Logan's body until he could place the little piece of himself into one of those terrible, aching voids.

The darkness in his friend lit up from inside with the addition, and Logan seemed none the wiser. Kurt smiled, very faintly.

"My dearest friends. You must not cry too much for me. I know the pain is great but it will fade in time. And here, this way...there is always a piece of me with you, a _part_ of you now, you will not be alone. I will be watching, I will be with you." He knew they couldn't hear him, but it almost felt better for Kurt to keep up the concept of the words, even as he eddied forward and reached through the containment shell to place the second bit of soul-stuff into the darkness of Kitty's heart.

Unlike with Logan, there was the faintest echo of a physical sensation as he did this, and Kitty drew in a sudden, almost helpless breath. Her eyes came up and for a moment, just one long protracted beat of a heart he had no longer, she was looking straight at him. Not _through_ him, but _at_ him, her face shocked and wild with sorrow. He could see her lips move without the sound accompanying.

'Kurt?'

He had just enough time to smile with all the love he'd ever felt, to release the piece of himself to her care, before the light flared around him and he was finally Called Home.


	2. Memorials

There are rules, what you're supposed to do the first _day_ after a loved one dies...then the first _week_...then the first _month_...all the way to the first _year_, to the first _Yartzeit_. When it was Peter she was mourning, she had drug herself through it all, like clockwork, like an automaton dragging behind it the weight of a crushed and broken heart. But she had done it, all the way through, and she had come out the other side not like a phoenix but like something stumbling out of hibernation, weak and fragile and tremulous but _alive_.

When it was Kurt she was mourning, she'd done nothing at all.

It wasn't that Kitty didn't feel the grief, or that her German friend hadn't deserved to be honored in such a way. Quite the contrary, in fact: the pain of his passing had been so great it had swallowed her whole, a foe enormous and insurmountable that went with her every moment she went insubstantial and haunted her sleeping hours. Kurt's absence in her life, as she tried to pull it back together and install it into a rhythm, was unchartable, the leviathan in the deep. The heat-death of her capacity to care. She could not turn to look at it, she could not address it, she could not listen to the howl of the winds in her own heart or it would be all she'd ever do again.

She never finished mourning Kurt. She never started. She just put it aside and moved forward and turned the lights off on the parts of her that played pirates in the Danger Room and stayed up until three am watching Errol Flynn and went to every two-bit circus that rolled its way through New York and watched the acrobats with the eyes of an enchanted child.

It wasn't accurate to say she never thought of him now, years after the accident, but it _was_ perhaps accurate to say that the ache of his loss had become something she'd learned to live with. He didn't fill her every waking thought. Not every dream was haunted by his bright, sad eyes. Except-except now, watching the news of the heavy rains in Germany and watching the flooding tear through the landscape Kurt had once introduced her to as _home_, in a year that felt like it was a million years away, he was fresh on her mind. The distressed, unhappy faces of the displaced German refugees stirred a simulacrum in her mind of the fuzzy blue elf, his voice full of pain and compassion. He had always cared for his people, whether that be the X-Men or mutants or Germans or the Roma, often times far more than the last two groups had ever cared for him. He would have wanted to go home, to help the helpless, to touch and bolster the few remaining scraps he had left behind him of the parts of his childhood he had cherished.

She took the Blackbird without warning or asking permission that evening, headed for Bavaria.

The plane mostly flew itself, and in the time it took to get from New York to Germany-even at such an accelerated pace-Kitty looked over the small portfolio she had taken from her office. Now that she had it all together in one place, it seemed so _paltry_; just a few names, not even enough to fill up a printed page, of people Kurt had once known that remained alive. Feuer the Fire-Eater, whose name was of course not really Feuer, Annalisa, who had been Amanda's alternate for the acrobatic performance, an old priest in a small town near to Winzeldorf whom Kurt had apparently written letters to his entire life outside of Germany. A handful of others, people whom Kitty had never met, whom she realized abruptly may not have even known Kurt had passed away. What could have Father Schroder thought, when the letters suddenly stopped? Did Annalisa wonder why no more Christmas presents arrived from America, clumsily but lovingly wrapped? Did-

-no. It was too much. Putting a hand over her eyes, Kitty pushed the papers to the side and waited for the alert that would tell her she needed to help the plane land somewhere discrete and out of the way of the swollen Danube. She would have to deal with them one at a time, nor risk drowning in something far more dangerous and more potent than the dirty flood water.

She took a day to deal with each of the names on the list. She had to; every encounter was a _process_, a _production_ even, no matter how kind Feuer was, no matter how sad and understanding Father Schroder had seemed, no matter how lovely Annalisa's children were. Every day she had to dismantle some of the armor around her heart, take to the fortress she'd built inside herself with a wrench and a crowbar until she'd torn pieces of it down, only so that she could let out the pain and sorrow and the phantom images of a departed blue and fuzzy friend that were appropriate to each situation. She sat over coffee, tea, and most often _Dinkelacker_-of course-and reminisced, made golems out of her memories so that she could pour all her associated emotion into them and carve them into life with a gesture and hastily murmured Hebrew. Rage. Guilt. Defeat. Pain. Loneliness. Love. Fear. Everything she had ever felt for or about Kurt, shaped like clay by her hands and heart and laid out on the kiln of the strangers' attentions, baked by the fire of their shared longing for a man long gone.

By the time she crossed the last name off of the list, Kitty felt like she'd been upended and all of her contents poured out. There was a hollowness in her almost the shape and size of the immeasurable grief she'd held in her, and she was afraid to explore the edges of the wound, unsure if she was more scared of finding it wasn't all mended or finding that it _was_.

The last day was supposed to be for herself, to recover her composure before she dove head-first back into the chaos and violence that so often surrounded the school. She bought a cheap wind-up camera at a local tourist shop and spent most of the day wandering through Winzeldorf, taking pictures of the churches or the gardens in the mid-summer sweat; anything that caught her eye and made her think of Kurt. She found, as she filled up the roll of film, that it wasn't pain that she felt every time she pressed the shutter. For the first time since Kurt had died, she could think on him with fondness that wasn't riding on the tail of the sharp-toothed monster that had been her _missing_.

Kitty had been afraid it would feel like a betrayal. Instead, letting go felt more like she had finally stopped the crying she'd never started, finally accepted the reality that Kurt was _gone_, and while that wasn't _okay_, it wasn't the end of the world.

_It wasn't the end of the world_.

As the sun set, she packed a late dinner and hiked out to the ruins of Schloss Wagner.

The villagers of Winzeldorf had more or less torn the manor down with their bare hands and their farming tools, in the days after Kurt's birth, fueled by their rage at Mystique's murderous deceit and by their own ignorant fear. That had been years and years ago, but no one had ever come to clean up the mess or clear away the broken stone and rotted wood. It was if the locals felt the whole place was cursed, and maybe they did-their ignorance seemed to have no end. Still, their ignorance meant it was a good place to pick her way onto some broken bit of wall and have some solitude to tie her newfound sense of peace off with.

Kurt wouldn't have wanted her to bury herself in grief anyway. It had been hard, trying to pull back enough to get perspective, but it felt so obvious now. He'd have been so _upset_ with her, letting the pall of his death drain the color from _everything_ in her life. She had spent three years failing to honor his memory, failing to honor his passing, more or less _failing him_ at every turn, and Kitty Pryde was convinced she was not going to _fail Kurt_ any longer. No, now was time to try to embrace the _joie de vivre_ he'd left behind, and go back out to _live life_ again instead of simply _surviving_. Feeling a smile creep over her face, Kitty raised her beer to the last rays of the sunset. If she could not honor him as was befitting _her_ faith, she could at least honor him with his. "The Lord be with you, Fuzzy."

She had just about gotten the beer to her mouth when the _absolute last sound_ she expected to hear rasped itself into being out of the darkening woods behind her. The _last voice_ she could have anticipated, which was almost _ironic_ given everything else.

"And also with you, _Katzchen._"


End file.
